Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist